How about a $200 to $250 Epson LX-300+?
http://www.nextdayofficesupplies.com/Catalog/P...11C640001/
http://www.officedepot.com/a/product...ot-Matrix/

Or maybe a Oki Microline - slightly more expensive:
http://www.cdw.com/shop/prod...EDC=596508

There are a number of impact printers that has the same, or lower, price than they had 20 years ago even if ignoring the inflation. If they where commercially viable 20 years ago, they are most definitely acceptable solutions now too.

When it comes to serial communication, I normally work with microcontrollers as I mentioned earlier, and not separate serial chips. The last family I worked with was the Freescale MPC885 family, which has bit stuffing, CRC-16, CRC-32 etc. I think the fastest speed is 66Mbps. The version I have worked with only have one such channel, but there should be models with up to 3 channels. Optional hardware crypto accelerator, dual TX10/100, ... makes it a very nice communication processor when needing higher speeds. I think the STR71x microcontrollers may be an alternative too, but limited to CRC16 and a single channel. I may be wrong, but I think they manage up to 16Mbps. An important thing here is that processor cores are getting cheaper and cheaper, which means that in a number of situations, people are selecting a processor+peripherial combo instead of finding a free-standing chip that has to be glued to a separate processor.

Spending a few minutes before selecting graphics card, and you will be able to run Linux on a new PC.

I have worked with custom-designed PCI (actually large CompactPCI (cPCI) telco DSP boards) boards together with Linux. If replacing the PCI controller with a PCI-E controller, it isn't harder to design for the newer PCI Express bus either.

And for hobbyists, the PC is still very much used as hardware platform. Either using the supervisor interface on the motherboard, or by using the huge number of microcontrollers with USB or Ethernet.

No, I don't think my view is too narrow. On the contrary - I see opportunities. Things possible to do today, that wasn't possible to do with the old 8-bit PC bus, or the 16-bit ISA bus. The huge bandwidth improvements means that a serially connected microcontroller can do a lot of useful things. Things that once required a ISA prototype board or similar. The PC has never stopped being a useful tool for development.